Walking tour through history, lake and culture
5 February 2026
By Federica Lassi
In Mandello, the prelude to Christmas is marked by a simple tradition, built over the years by volunteer hands and community enthusiasm, which despite the passage of time, continues to hold a special place in the collective imagination. Not for its spectacle or fanfare, but because it manages to hold together what elsewhere often falls apart: collaboration, memory, and a sense of belonging. We're talking about the float parade that, every December 24th, lights up the town.
On this evening, every year, the silence of winter gives way to the beat of the band, the clatter of the Magi's horses, the cries of children who await the first float as one awaits a revelation. A script that repeats itself but remains surprising each time, as if the village needed to reaffirm itself as alive through an ancient language made of lights, music, and fantasy.
Traditions aren't born by chance. They are sown by someone who, in a distant time, believed it was worth trying. In Mandello, that someone had a name and a face: Lazzaro Poletti, remembered as one of the first to give organized form to this event, capable of involving hamlets, groups, and friends of the town. An Alpino, a musician (he was part of the Lecco Alpini band and for years played in the Mandello Musical Corps), but, above all, a man of Mandello, who saw the parade as a way to build community. In the 1990s, he was the first to knock on the door of the municipal administration to propose creating the parade, in which he always participated in the front row with his float from Molina, the hamlet where he lived.
In those days, by early November, people would be in basements, sanding down wooden planks, shaping cardboard stars, and imagining suspended nativity scenes and improbable figures to decorate the floats, with support from the council that was, and continues to be, always present. The evening of the 24th was simply the final chapter of a story made up of hours stolen from the stove, cold hands, and discussions about perfecting a detail. Today, those hamlets play a less prominent role. Associations, oratories, schools, and groups have taken their place, yet the principle behind the parade has remained identical: a village working together to tell its own story.
Why does this tradition continue to work? Perhaps because it speaks a language we desperately need to hear: that of shared fantasy. Every float is a statement of intent. It doesn't matter if it's sacred or ironic, essential or pyrotechnic: its purpose is to create an image that touches the heart, even if only for a second. Alongside the floats are Santas on motorcycles, along with citizens who joyfully join the procession (not before stretching out their hands to receive the sweets thrown down in torrents from the floats). It's a Christmas that gives up nothing: neither the sacred nor the profane, neither folklore nor safety, neither remembrance nor innovation.
Only a global pandemic could stop this cheerful procession through the streets of Mandello (in 2020 and 2021). Three years without a parade were long, too long for a town that has always measured time by this event. The return of the parade, after the Covid interlude, wasn't simply a “restoration”: it was a clarification. Mandello demonstrated that it has a memory. That it knows how to restart. That it doesn't want to leave in the shadows what has defined it for decades (the parade is unique throughout the region).
When the procession resumed its route, from Viale della Costituzione to Piazza del Mercato (where, unfailingly, the Alpini distributed mulled wine and roasted chestnuts), the accompanying crowd was not simply witnessing an event: they were rediscovering a piece of themselves. Every community preserves certain rituals that need not be justified, because they speak directly to its identity. The Christmas float parade is one of them. No matter how many streets will change, how many volunteers will pass the baton, how many floats will still risk getting stuck in some bottleneck (it really happened). And it will happen, because tradition also thrives on the unexpected. What matters is that Mandello continues to recognise itself in that landscape of lights that cuts through the night of Christmas Eve. Because as long as there is someone willing to light a light bulb on a float, hand out a candy, sing a march, as long as there is a child who raises his eyes and an adult who smiles as he sees what he has always seen... then, in Mandello, it will truly be Christmas.
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